I think it’s absolutely possible. Charismatic leaders tend to attract good people. But if you’re asking about Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, I think the answer is more complicated. Certainly, Tim Cook is a great leader, and very capable. As an operations master, he is probably even a better manager than Jobs. But Jobs chose him in part because he wasn’t a threat to his own stardom. Cook was okay being in his boss’ shadow. Some people I spoke to who knew Steve, also believe that he wanted to make sure to pick someone who was good, but wouldn’t be a threat to his legacy of greatness.

There’s a funny story that someone told me from around the time he was first diagnosed with cancer. After Apple announced that Steve had had surgery, the stock had fallen just two percent. When he heard about it, his response was a disappointed, “That’s it?”

Should I sell my stock?

That’s not really for me to say. My book was not meant to provide advice about whether to sell or buy stock, but to tell the story of how an iconic company was dealing with the loss of its visionary founder. It’s about Apple during a very specific period from the last years of Steve Jobs’s reign to the first two years of his successor Tim Cook’s.

In the fast-moving world of software development, as in show business, the emphasis is on youth.

But a new study suggests this bias is probably mistaken. Researchers Patrick Morrison and Emerson Murphy-Hill of North Carolina State University delved into data generated by the more than 1.6 million users of StackOverflow, an online forum for developers, who pose and respond to programming questions. The site generates a reputation score for users based on peer respect, programming knowledge and site familiarity.

Focusing on a sample of 84,284 members who answered questions last year, Morrison and Murphy-Hill found that age and reputation were positively correlated right up into a user’s 40s (there wasn’t sufficient data beyond this age). In other words, older members of StackOverflow tended to have a better reputation, even after the scientists adjusted for length of membership.

The study also found that older programmers weighed in on a wider range of subjects, and that older programmers (those over 37) had an edge in IOS and Windows Phone 7, while for other current technologies there was no difference between older and younger programmers. “The data doesn’t support the bias against older programmers,” Murphy-Hill said in a statement. “If anything, just the opposite.”

My grandfather died on Halloween. Thanks to Hurricane Sandy, none of the New York family members could attend the funeral in Massachusetts. Fortunately, another option became available: The ceremony was streamed online, and so my wife, daughter and I gathered around a laptop in our living room to watch the live webcast.

The rabbi began by giving technology center stage, poignantly acknowledging that the virtual participants played an important role in honoring the deceased’s memory. After that, technology receded into the background for the Massachusetts crowd. My grandmother looked like a bereaved widow. Online coverage didn’t affect her demeanor—or anyone else’s.

At my house, however, things were different. The technology raised all sorts of problems and questions.

Vapor rises from cooling towers at the Saint-Laurent-des-Eaux nuclear power plant, operated by Electricite de France SA (EDF), in Saint-Laurent-des-Eaux, France, on Thursday, Sept. 13, 2012.

The global appetite for energy is growing rapidly as the population climbs and economies in the developing world quicken their ascent. Yet at the same time, oil, coal and other fossil fuels that meet the bulk of the world’s energy needs generate carbon emissions linked to climate change and its potentially harmful effects.

Nuclear power offers a way out of this dilemma, according to supporters. It can be scaled up quickly to meet much of the growing demand for energy, they say, without pouring more carbon into the atmosphere.

Opponents say nuclear power is too expensive to expand without massive government subsidies. They also point to the twin safety issues of reactor accidents, as in Japan’s meltdowns last year, and the use of nuclear-power programs as cover for countries to develop nuclear weapons.

What do you think? Vote and tell us your thoughts, and we'll publish voting results and highlights from your comments.

A Suzlon Energy Ltd. wind turbine stands in a corn field at the Edison Mission Group Big Sky wind farm in Ohio, Illinois.

Federal subsidies have spurred the growth of renewable-energy production in recent years, but many of those subsidies are set to expire soon unless Congress acts.

Supporters say the subsidies will allow renewable technologies to grow enough to become cost-competitive with conventional energy sources—and that their benefits include reduced pollution and decreased dependence on foreign oil.

Critics want to scale back or eliminate the subsidies, arguing that renewable sources have had decades to get established but still aren’t cost-competitive with conventional energy.

Tell us what you think in advance of a special report we’ll be publishing in The Wall Street Journal. We may use some of your comments in print.

Researchers incorporated circuits and sensors into a flexible “second skin.”

Researchers have succeeded in creating semiconductors with the flexibility of rubber — and embedded the circuitry into skin-like sleeves that can be slipped onto fingertips.

The circuitry was fashioned from gold and silicon mesh, one micron thick, then sliced off a solid wafer and affixed to thin, malleable plastic. One potential application is virtual-reality gloves: Wearers of these “smart fingertips” can experience artificially generated touch and texture, via electrical stimulation. But the research team, which includes engineers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Northwestern University, as well as China’s Dalian University of Technology, also envision incorporating various sensors into this second skin. They foresee gloves for cardiac surgeons that take EKG readings directly from exposed heart tissue, and immediately treat damaged regions with electrical current….

People pitching goods via spam probably earn only about $200 million annually, while some $20 billion is spent fending off unwanted email, according to a new academic article. That ratio of cost (to society) to benefit (to miscreants), 100:1, is far higher than that for many other kinds of commercial crime, the authors say.

Some people use “spam” to refer to any annoying commercial email, but this paper, by Justin M. Rao, of Microsoft Research, and David H. Reiley, of Google, is about the kind that’s been explicitly illegal since 2003: Messages from companies the user has never dealt with before, and where there is no opt-out provision. Illegal spam also typically lacks a legitimate return address.

Rao and Reiley estimate, based on analyses of Yahoo Mail data and other sources, that 1.8%-3% of the 50 billion pieces of spam sent out each day get through anti-spam defenses. Other assumptions included that each piece takes 5 seconds to delete, and that computer users’ time is worth $25 an hour. To the value of wasted time the authors added $6 billion spent annually on anti-spam software.

The estimate about profit is based on the known costs of renting the services of spammers and the revenue data from computer scientists who have infiltrated spammers’ operations, among other things. For spam to be profitable the authors estimated that only 1 in 25,000 spam recipients needs to open the email, get enticed, and make a gray-market purchase.

For context, the ratio of the cost to society of car theft to thieves’ earnings is in the range of 7:1 to 30:1, the authors say.

Just as interesting as the paper’s broad findings, however, are the details it offers about the cat-and-mouse game between spammers and email providers. One reason for the consolidation of email providers into the “big three” of Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail, for example, is that only huge companies have the wherewithal to identify and deflect spam.

Other factoids from the spam wars:

In 2011, Yahoo “experienced an average of 2.5 million sign-ups for new accounts each day. The anti-spam team deactivated 25% of these immediately, because of clearly suspicious patterns in account creating … and deactivated another 25% of these accounts within a week of activation, due to suspicious outbound email activity.”…

Intellectually, there’s no doubt he’s on solid ground. But if you want to maintain a position in the middle class, given the vagaries of the humanities job market… well, you may want to make sure you snare some lucrative stock options first. …

I’ve watched my share of good TED talks, but Evgeny Morozov casts a skeptical eye on the TED phenomenon in a new (ungated) piece in the New Republic (which, it’s safe to say, has become the redoubt from which the most trenchant anti-tech-babble, anti-neuro-hype salvos are being launched).

Is it really true, for example, as Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna write in a short new TED book, that “everyone who has a BlackBerry—or iPhone or Nexus One—can be their own ambassador”? One wonders. (Actually, one does not.) This may not be a fresh observation, but it is well put by Morozov:

Today TED is an insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering—a place where ideas, regardless of their quality, go to seek celebrity, to live in the form of videos, tweets, and now e-books. In the world of TED—or, to use their argot, in the TED “ecosystem”—books become talks, talks become memes, memes become projects, projects become talks, talks become books—and so it goes ad infinitum in the sizzling Stakhanovite cycle of memetics, until any shade of depth or nuance disappears into the virtual void.

But Morozov also detects, besides superficiality, a distinctively TED-style attitude toward politics in which institutions and democratic debate are derided and technology is looked to as a deus ex machina that will solve such once-intractable problems as poverty and illiteracy—obviating those pesky voters and squabbling elected leaders. At best, Morozov says, this is naive, but, at worst, it is sinister. Who does not hear some disturbing echoes of past anti-democratic thinkers (and dictators) in the following passage, taken from the Khannas’ book:

Biographies

Gary Rosen is the editor of Review and the former managing editor of Commentary magazine. His articles and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. He is the author of "American Compact: James Madison and the Problem of Founding" and the editor of "The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq."